As one of 200 trainers selected nationwide to gentle a wild mustang, Rodden has until Sept. 18 to get Bucephalus to Texas and compete for $50,000 in cash prizes as part of the Extreme Mustang Makeover.

If you drew up a list of things that divide the country, horses probably wouldn’t appear near the top. But they should, if the response to NEWSWEEK’s interview last week with wild horse advocate Deanne Stillman is anything to go by.

After surviving the ice age, the industrial revolution and the slaughterhouse, America’s wild horse population is facing a new threat: the U.S. government. The Bureau of Land Management announced this week that it is considering euthanizing wild horses to curb the population on the range and in federal holding facilities.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo have revealed they reversed a vasectomy on an endangered horse to allow it to reproduce naturally — the first-known operation of its kind on an endangered species.

“You have to acquire a taste for these horses,” said David Grant, who has almost two dozen tackies on his Darlington County farm. “They are not as attractive as an Arabian, a quarterhorse or a thoroughbred, but now that I breed them and use them, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

The Border Patrol’s “Operation Noble Mustang” adopts horses from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse and burro program, blending today’s technology with yesterday’s law enforcement traditions, the agency said.

Texas A&M-Kingsville’s Institute for Ranch Management is offering what university officials call the first ever masters degree program for ranchers sort of a Harvard Business School for cowboys. In addition to graduate-level business courses, students are schooled in rangeland specialties, including animal nutrition and wildlife management.

Corraled in a federal holding pen at Palomino Valley, Nev., a buckskin mare with the number 9598 cold-branded in code on its neck suddenly faces an uncertain future. When the 12-year-old was rounded up in November as part of a federal program to humanely control the mustang population in the West, it looked as if it would be relocated to a grassy farm in Oklahoma or Kansas. But that all changed weeks later.